Pedro Cevallos (pedro_cevallos@hotmail.com)
Sat, 18 Dec 1999 11:15:42 EST
>Hey look, I love the music all of it! But I cannot stand playin >around
>with issues of any type.
>If there are unspoken race issues, they should be spoken or else all >of
>this shit is meaningless. I cant see any of you on the net so I >don't
>know what color any of you are, i'm black if that matters and >most if not
>all of my comments (and my signature:) reflect that.
One of things I love the most about the net is the fact that you are
completely devoid of any social cues of phenotypes. You're right. I have
no idea what race/ethnicity you all consider yourselves to be. You could be
an asian middle aged lesbian in a wheelchair typing away in Decatur, Ga
about Mos Def or an Eastern European teenage boy in the Republic of Georgia
going off on Herbie Hancock's back catalog. The one thing that binds us is
our love -- obsession at times -- for the groovy shit that makes you wanna
shake your ass.
Race is an amorphous social construct with the sole purpose of dividing and
categorizing homo sapiens into specific artifical categories. I grew up in
South America and considered myself to be Ecuadorian. I moved to Miami as a
little kid and people started labeling me as "hispanic" or "latino". I went
away to college in Pennsylvania and people would refer to me as "a person of
color". Personally, I'd prefer to be referred to by my first name: PEDRO,
but as people we choose to pigeonhole other mammals like ourselves into
narrow labels.
My experiences with race have been somewhat unusual. Growing up in Latin
America and Miami I was part of the majority. I've only felt like a
minority twice in my life -- when I went to Penn State and when I was at
Moorehouse College in Atlanta. It's an interesting experience...one that
everyone should experience at least once in their life.
...and the beat goes on...
Pedro Cevallos
--
"...the world is a comedy to those who think and
a tragedy to those who feel..."
-- Horace Walpole --
http://www.cat.net/~cevallos/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sat Dec 18 1999 - 17:23:22 MET